


Of Family

by differentsizesofinfinity



Series: Ellen!Verse [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:23:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/differentsizesofinfinity/pseuds/differentsizesofinfinity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam takes Ellen on his annual pilgrimage to Singer Salvage and tells her about his family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Family

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't mean for this to be wincest, but it just happened.

Prompt:Your most treasured photograph  
Fandom: Supernatural  
Characters: Sam Winchester, OC, Dean Winchester, Bobby Singer, Ellen Harvelle, Jo Harvelle, Castiel  
Pairing: Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester (whoops)  
Summary: Sam takes Ellen on his annual pilgrimage to Singer Salvage and tells her about his family.  
It was six months after Dean- I guess my uncle, had come by for supper, and nobody had talked about it yet. My dad had come home after one that night, and him and my mom argued for another half hour after that. Things had been tense since then, but everything seemed to be getting back to normal a bit, when my dad decided that we were driving down to South Dakota - something he usually did on his own every year. So he packed up the truck and I got settled in the passenger seat.

I didn’t say much during the drive - even when we stopped at a truck stop for lunch. I didn’t ask why we were taking his old truck, instead of the SUV he drove to work, which was much nicer and had an iPod jack, and I didn’t ask why he kept popping classic rock cassettes into the player. I almost asked when we stopped at a greasy diner that my dad normally would have never even thought about eating at, but I couldn’t bring myself to. As long as I can remember Dad had driven down to South Dakota every spring, and he never told me or my mom why. I didn’t know why he brought me along that time, but I was glad, and was going to do everything I could to avoid messing this up.

My dad finally stopped the car at an abandoned junkyard. The cars were all rusted out, and it looked like there had once been a building of some kind there, but it had burned down. When he stepped out of the truck smiling, I mentally sent him a huge WTF but followed hesitantly.

“What is this place, Dad?”

“This was the only place that ever really felt like home, until I met your mom.” His smile didn’t falter, and I’m pretty sure that was the most I’d ever seen him smile, except when Dean had showed up on our doorstep.

I watched him climb up onto the roof of one of the junkers, spread out a blanket, and motion for me to follow. The climb wasn’t as easy for me, because I had not inherited his giraffe legs. Once I was up there, he took a sip from a flask he had produced from his pocket, wincing slightly, and offering it to me. Before I took it I could smell the sharp alcohol coming off it. I hesitated, watching him, incase it was a test or something.

“Be careful with that, it’s pretty strong. It was the guy who owned this place’s specialty.” He looked over at me as saw my questioning gaze. ‘’Don’t worry, I won’t tell your mom if you won’t. ‘Sides, I was probably twelve the first time Bobby slipped me a little something.” He smiled fondly, and I sipped the liquor. It burned down my throat and I almost choked. Dad just chuckled and and dug a creased picture out of his wallet. I’d seen it once before - and he had told me it was of his family. He passed it to me and I took it gingerly.

“This is your family, right?”

“Was. Was my family. You and your mom are my family now.” He said adamantly and it confused me why he would say that, but I was still not questioning things.

“Tell me about them.’

He nodded, then I could tell he was thinking of where to start.

“The guy in the wheelchair, that’s Bobby. This was his place. He was… he was more of a father to Dean and I than our dad had ever been. Sometimes Dad would drop us off at Bobby’s and take off for a few weeks and it was the best. Bobby would take us out in the yard and throw a ball around with us. Once I remember he took us hunting. He couldn’t get us to shoot at that deer for the life of him.” Dad laughed “And if we had we probably could have hit it, we were pretty good shots even then.” That was new, I didn’t know my dad had ever even held a gun, never mind him being any sort of marksman. “And Bobby taught Dean everything he knows about cars. That’s probably the only reason the Impala is still running.” He lapsed into silence then, and I could tell he was remembering being here as a kid.  
“Bobby was one of the toughest bastards I ever met. Old man took a bullet to the head, survived for hours in the hospital. Regained consciousness just enough to remind Dean and I that we were idjts.” I took his hand as I saw his eyes start to mist over.

“Who’s she?” I pointed to the dark haired woman in the picture, trying to change the subject.

“Ellen Harvelle. She was a hell of a woman. Ran a bar called the Roadhouse, and I tell ya, even the toughest guy to walk through those doors knew not to mess with her. She raised Jo, that’s the blonde girl there, all by herself after her husband died, and she did a hell of a job. Ellen was a force to be reckoned with, and God help us all if Dean and I didn’t check in for a couple of day.” He chuckled fondly “Once she even sent out search parties for us.  
“That’s why I named you Ellen you know. I wanted you to be as strong, and to love as fiercely as she did.” Oh yeah, because that wasn’t setting a high bar or anything. “And you are, you do. I couldn’t be any prouder of you.” He pulled me into an awkward side hug and I could tell that between the beer he’d had at dinner and the almost the entire flask he’d been sipping at, my dad was drunk. \

“Jo, Ellen’s girl… well she definitely took after her mother. That girl was a firecracker.” he laughed. “The first time I met her she almost shot me. She once followed Dean and I after we’d stopped at the Roadhouse for the night, damn near got herself killed, and us when her mom found out. She made a killing at that bar, poker, pool, darts, even the old arcade games. ‘Course it helped that people just assumed she was some pretty blonde thing and bet big thinking it was going to be easy to beat her. Now I’ve seen a lot of pool being hustled, been the one doing the hustling just as often, and that girl was just had a knack for it. But she had the brains too.” Hustling pool? Isn’t that like illegal or something? Or was it just deeply frowned upon? Either way, he was talking about it like it was an everyday occurrence.

“Her and her mom died when the gas main at a convenience store they were at blew.”

“That guy in the trenchcoat, Cas, god I don’t even know what to say about him. He was probably the strangest person I’ve ever met, but he always showed up when we needed him… most of the time. He uh, made a lot of mistakes - some pretty terrible ones, and I don’t think Dean ever forgave him… but then Dean never made those kinds of mistakes. He was always the one cleaning up everybody else’s mistakes. Cas always had the best intentions, I know he did, but you know what they say about those. He just went about it the wrong way, and he tried - he really did try to fix his mistakes. Of course he couldn’t though, because you can’t ever make that kind of thing right. Everything you do, you just can’t ever put it back the way it was, and Dean never understood that.” He was taking that whole thing with that Cas guy pretty seriously, and relating it to something personal that I didn’t know about, and I knew that if I let him go on he’d talk all night, so I changed the subject.

“What about him? You never told me anything about him.” Dad paused for a minute, thinking.

“Dean is… he raised me, and I was such a bratty kid, and he just did whatever he could to make sure I was happy. He did Christmas one year. It was pitiful, and I knew that wasn’t how it was supposed to go, but he tried, and that was all we really needed. Just us.

“You know when you grow up the way we did, on the road, living in each other's pocket, never staying in the same place long enough to make friends…” He shakes his head “God, we shared a bed until Dean was seventeen. What did Dad expect to happen? When he found out, I left for Stanford. I abandoned Dean. When he showed up at my dorm I couldn’t not go with him, ya know? I left the life I had always wanted behind, and ran back to what I had left, because he was there. And it was hard, but he was there do I did it. Then it was over, we won, and Dean wanted an apple pie life for me… So I left him again. I went back to law school, met your mother, and I didn’t hear from Dean. It was like he was trying to make it easier on me, cold turkey ya know? But he only made it worse. This is the life I dreamed about when I was a kid, but you can’t imagine how much I wanted to leave with him when he showed up a few months ago.

“I love your mother Ellen, I really do, and there aren’t words to describe how much I love you… God I love you so much, but it’s always been him… it’ll always be Dean.” He pulls me into a hug and he’s crying openly. I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad cry so that was a shock to me. The bigger shock though was that he had just admitted to being in a romantic (sexual?) relationship with his brother for years. Did my mom know? Was that what they had fought about that night?

“Please don’t tell your mom any of this Ellen, she doesn’t know, especially not about… Dean and I.” He begged and I couldn’t help but agree.

“Of course Daddy.” I rubbed his shoulder gently.

“Do you hate me? I-I could take you back and then you’d never have to see me again…”

“I couldn’t Dad, not because of that, never Daddy.” He hugged me tighter then, like I was the only thing keeping him from floating off into zero gravity.


End file.
